Rackspace Cloud Files Launches Support for Custom Container Metadata

Filed in by Megan Meza | March 18, 2011 8:37 am

The Rackspace Cloud Files[1] team is pleased to announce our support for custom container metadata. Metadata can be attached to objects and now containers in order to categorize them and mark them with any sort of data.

If you’re new to Cloud Files, let me recap a few basic definitions. An object is the basic storage entity and any optional metadata that represents the files you store in the Cloud Files system. When you upload data to Cloud Files, the data is stored and consists of a location (container), the object’s name, and any metadata consisting of key/value pairs.

The great news is that you have more options available now that we have launched custom container metadata. For example, if you are using Cloud Files as the storage target for system backups, you might want to store the time of the backup as the container metadata or the origin of that backup. You could even store whether that backup was full or incremental, which would help with restores later.

The uses for custom container metadata are simple but often key to implementation strategies for Cloud storage. Container metadata cannot be searched against or listed at this time, but will show up in any HEAD or GET request for a container.

Cloud Files users can set their container metadata by using the Cloud Files API[2]. Simply do a POST on the container with X-Container-Meta-<user-specified-name> headers.

If you have any questions or comments about this feature, we’re happy to hear them!